


A Conversation in Askr

by Raikishi



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Post-Canon, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26277841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raikishi/pseuds/Raikishi
Summary: “I don’t choose the Golden Deer,” she says and in a much lower voice he has to strain to hear, “I have not done so in several lifetimes. Because it’s too painful to go back when I choose you.”NG+Byleth meets a Claude in Askr
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 11
Kudos: 137





	A Conversation in Askr

“See you later, Teach! There’s no satisfying my curiosity just sitting around,” a younger Claude from a different world winks at Byleth, tossing out a casual salute as he runs away from her.

Claude catches the little dip in his younger self’s gaze, a fleeting there and gone drop down to Byleth’s bikini top. That Claude corrects himself before anyone can see, hiding the moment of weakness beneath the shadow of his raised hand. With a too cheerful shout, he spins on his heels and calls out to yet another Byleth, a hurricane of questions and eagerness that verged on –

_“Insatiable,” Byleth accuses him but she does not appear much distressed._

_His wife stretches out beside him like a cat, her eyes half-lidded in the afterglow of pleasure, toying absently with the trail of hair on his abdomen in a light teasing way that made him twitch. She follows the motion with a lazy gaze, her smile stretching slow over her face like a huntress observing prey, “Absolutely insatiable.”_

“You’ve grown up to be less subtle,” this Byleth calls to him.

The similarity in their voices draws Claude out of his hiding place and sweeps away his guard in the blink of an eye –

Oh. 

He blinks down at blue hair instead of teal and feels a heat creep over the back of his neck.

Idiot. Of course their voices were similar. They were, by all rights, the same person just –

He blinks at this Byleth, mind stalling on the way she carries herself. There was something odd to her posture. A tension to her spine.

He stares at her, a little prick of discomfort in his chest, knowledge lent to a husband who was wholly devoted to his wife. She was upset. And very tired. 

“Sit,” Byleth says and he drops beside her without question, fingers twitching with the need to draw her into his arms.

He’d seen the look on her face many times in their early years. It meant she was thinking of the war. Of lives she could not save and responsibility she should not take. 

He follows this Byleth’s gaze to the students on the beach, his mind a whir with the new information. The students that had followed her are bright-eyed and eager, without the cast of death and grief. Ingrid catches a watermelon tossed to her without flinching –

_Ingrid doesn’t scream when a catapult hurls a boulder into the side of her pegasus, her expression twisted in pain, spitting a snarl as she rounds on Ashe. Hefts her lance and hurls it with deadly accuracy –_

Sylvain only smiles at Dorothea’s gibes instead of looking away. He elbows her like a friend because this Sylvain never killed Ferdinand before her eyes. 

_“He was our friend –“_

_“Yeah,” Sylvain sneers in a way that means he’s thinking of Felix, “Was.”_

In contrast …

Byleth looks out at them with the thousand-yard stare of a surviving soldier and that was wrong. This Teach - _Academy_ Teach - should know only mercenary work without messy grief lent by relationships. She should understand death as only an unfortunate truth that befell those who would never know her. Should only –

“Is my face really that interesting?” she asks, “No matter how hard you look, you won’t see what I’m scheming.”

Claude laughs at that, “Ah, I see I’m rubbing off on you already. What is it, only a few months since you’ve joined the Academy? I’m pleased to know your class leader has charmed you so well you would steal the words from his mouth.”

Byleth makes a noise, a laugh to some but not to a Claude who knew her too well. Not to one who had heard the crack of grief in her voice before and held her through the memories of war. 

“Ah… you didn’t choose the Golden Deer,” he says, reading the thought from her face and her expression goes shuttered.

“No …” she says, lifting her cape a little to reveal the Blue Lion broach, “Not this time.”

Claude narrows his eyes at her, the phrase striking a cord of realization.

_“What good are the goddess’ powers when I cannot use it for things that matter?” Byleth asks as she holds his chest together. Her fingers trek over the fresh bandages, the panes of his chest, his stomach, feeling out each part of him as if she were not certain he was real._

_He combs a hand through her hair, brushes her bangs out of her eyes, and kisses the deep sunk bruises beneath them. She looks exhausted and she smells of magic stretched thin._

_“I will turn the clock back again and again for you and there’s not a damn thing you can say to stop me,” she says against his mouth and he doesn’t raise an argument, only draws her into a hug, feeling her tremble like a star on the verge of collapse. There would be time enough later for him to pry about the limits of her gift. For now …_

_Her hands shake in his, sword calloused and rough, capable of holding time and twisting it to her command yet delicate as porcelain. He traces the knuckles and marvels at the fine bone. So breakable. So human despite the goddess in her blood._

“No? The previous time then? Did I chase you away, Teach?” he asks, keeping his tone light. 

Byleth’s mouth twitches, confirming his thoughts, “The last time I chose the Black Eagles.”

_“Sometimes I wish I could go back that far,” Byleth tells him one day against the backdrop of a wine red sunset. Edelgard’s colors._

_Her lips purse over the rim of a goblet. She tips her head against his chest when he tugs and leaves a stain on his shirt. He couldn’t care less. Claude only holds her tighter. In his present._

He drums his fingers against his chest, feeling out for the ring tucked to his heart, reminding himself that this Byleth was not his. That the hurt in his chest was not his to feel. 

His had stayed. He’d seen her only that morning in his bed, her hair alight with the sunlight, expression lax and so sweet he had been unable to resist kissing her. She had purred into his mouth sleepily, stroked a hand down his chest in an invite to stay – 

“Unhappy in Almyra?” he asks, keeping his tone light. 

He drops his hands when Byleth looks his way.

Her gaze drops to the collar of his armor and it is too full of knowing.

“I don’t choose the Golden Deer,” she says and in a much lower voice he has to strain to hear, “I have not done so in several lifetimes. Because it’s too painful to go back when I choose you.”

_Then why –_

She smiles at him again and it does not reach her eyes, “You are a difficult man to resist von Riegan.”

“I should hope so,” Claude says, proud of the way his voice does not tremble, ignoring the stone hurt in his chest and hating the insecurity that rose up within him, “… I told you once, there was no way I would let you go.”

Byleth laughs and it is full of sharpness.

“You never had the choice,” Byleth says and Claude flinches at her words, unable to hide the motion. Something like an apology passes over Byleth’s face as she studies him. Then understanding. She sighs. 

Beneath the setting sun, her face is sorrowful. The lines of her cheeks and eyes draw darker, painted over by shadows. 

“Neither did I,” she confesses, her voice wobbling for a half-second before she draws it tight again. The Ashen Demon’s rigid control extending its reach to every part of her, “In my first life … when you returned from Almyra, I told you those same words. Pulled you from your mount –“

_She twirls him as he had done years prior on a Garreg Mach dance floor, a smile on her mouth as she leans over him. He’s half giddy with the picture they present to the watching masses. A mercenary queen and her foreign prince. He can only imagine the gossip, made half-giddy by the idea of scandal._

_“There’s no way I’m letting you go now,” she breathes the promise against his lips, and he surrenders sweetly to his mercenary queen._

“And the next day I woke up in Remire,” she says.

Claude lets out a sharp breath. Relief burns through him first. Then shame. And a hot flash of grief as he realizes exactly what that means for her.

“Byleth,” he breathes out her name around jagged ice. 

“As if it were a dream, I saved you from the bandits. Traveled back to the monastery. Earned your trust yet again. I kept waiting to wake up but I never did,” her lip curls. He glimpses the faintest shadow of the battle-hardened mercenary and someone much colder, “The war came. We fought. We survived. The new dawn rose and I – ” 

Byleth breaks off, her expression terribly stoic but understandable to a husband who had shared her sorrow and her grief. She is overwrought and overextended. And so very tired.

“Only then did I wake up. I chose you again. And again. And then no more after that.”

“How many times have you gone back?”

“Too many,” Byleth says and then after a moment, laughs an unsteady hollow sound, “How funny. That’s what father –“

_How many times have you seen him die?_ Claude’s head spins with realization, remembering a gallows-haunted gaze and grief-stricken eyes, _How many times have you seen_ all _of us die?_

“– said about his age. ‘After a certain point … it stops mattering’,” Byleth smiles and it is a morbid little thing.

Claude takes her hand. Cannot bear not touching any longer. Her gaze drops down and there is a flicker of distress in her eyes. The last time he’d touched her would have been on his return. At the start of their lives, at the very beginning of a dawn this Byleth would never see. 

He holds her fingertips loosely, allowing her the option to pull away, knowing she does not like to be shackled when she was raw and vulnerable with grief. Allowing her to come to him, and very slowly, she takes his hand in a firmer hold. She trembles as his wife does when the war leaned too close and the ghosts breathed too hard down her neck; it takes everything in Claude not to hold her closer. 

“I lead a class. I fight. I win. I wake up and we all meet once again in Remire. No matter what class I lead. What king or emperor I crown.”

And just as his wife had looked after Jeralt, after Dimitri, after Edelgard; this Byleth looks at him with a red-rimmed gaze and no tears, only a terrible awareness of her powerlessness and a grief that shredded her through.

“You’ve tried everything,” Claude realizes and there’s a little thread of relief in Byleth’s eyes, the heavy desperate sort from someone who had carried their thoughts alone for far too long.

“Enough to know father always dies. There is always a war. And I always sleep,” Byleth’s eyes drift to Dimitri and Edelgard in the far distance and she bites her lip, “And that they never survive together.”

His mind whirs with the knowledge, rocked like a ship caught in storm, “What are you trying with this life?”

Byleth flinches.

“You haven’t been,” Claude realizes, reading the twitch and immediately understanding the hesitation in her, “You gave up –”

Her expression goes flat and angry, hand tensing in his, words stirring on her tongue that would no doubt be sharp and cruel –

“I would have too,” he says and the fight bleeds out of her. 

“Don’t … don’t say that just to placate –“ she laughs and it is, again, that low exhausted noise, “Father said once … a long time ago - I would have no peace in my own thoughts if I ever married you.”

Claude quirks a smile at the familiar words.

“I’m not just saying that to placate you,” he says, “I would have too. To relive that war over and over … I can’t imagine how that feels. Here I am trying to avoid just the one. That’s why …”

She smiles at him and it is brittle at the edges as she finishes his words, “Why you approached me today.”

“The others decided it might be worth a try,” he says, “A different Fodlan for those kids…”

He catches his own gaze, a little startled by the intensity of a younger him’s scrutiny until he realizes he is sat beside dear old Teach. Holding her hand. 

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“Never, Teach,” Claude says fiercely, squeezing her hand. 

He ignores the burning stare from his younger self, his focus wholly on Byleth.

He holds her hand to his chest. His wife had always run cold and he shivers a little at the familiar touch as she warms her fingertips against his skin. There’s a blade tucked around her forearms, poorly hidden and easily retrieved, but he doesn’t flinch at the sight and she does not go for it. Her fingers dip, instead, into his shirt, feeling out a path with absolute certainty until she comes upon her mother’s ring. 

He sees her sag a little in relief and then sees the little brush of envy in her eyes. Claude pulls his gloves off with his teeth, running arrow-calloused fingers over the soft curve of her jaw and over the back of her neck, feeling out the sensitive spot just below her ear. Byleth sighs, the tension bleeding out from her, and as she had done the morning he’d left, she turns into his touch, angles a kiss over the pulse of his wrist.

The gesture is so familiar he is forming words before he can think. 

“Teach, do you want to come with –“

“ _Don’t,_ ” she says sharply, fierce and goddess-commanding as she’d sounded that day in Edelgard’s throne room. Her eyes flash and the intensity of her gaze stalls the words in his throat. She pulls out of his reach with no small amount of regret, shaking as she looks away from him, “Don’t ask me that, Claude. Please.”

He won’t. He can’t.

Claude sits back on his moment of weakness, his mouth thinning out. He shouldn’t have offered. 

It was a foolish risk and unlike him but he’d always had a weakness for Byleth especially when she –

He shakes himself. No. This was not his wife. 

She could not exist in his world and if she did, her existence might … 

_Byleth smiles at him from the palace training grounds, glistening with sweat. He follows a droplet down her throat. The top of her breast. With a cough, she drags his gaze upwards again, meeting it with a mercenary’s challenge as she extends a hand out to him._

He cannot –

_Byleth blinks at him blearily in their bed, sleep-addled and vulnerable after five years of marriage. Her knife is still beneath the mattress and her sword on the nightstand. But she looks at him without tension in her shoulders, her eyes already drooping as she cuddles into the center of his chest, entrusting her back to his watch._

The thought of those memories wiping away. Mere pictures in sand …

He cannot – 

“I cannot risk you,” Byleth says for him and her words are slow as if she were fighting to rip them from herself, “As you wouldn’t risk me.”

“Right,” he agrees, thinking of a Byleth who stood opposite him as a stranger. The Ashen Demon with her sword at his throat when he tries to touch her heart. 

He leans back on his hands, staring up at the skies. He had understood, all those years ago when she’d carved a hole from the sky, that he loved a Goddess.

He understands, here and now, exactly what that entailed. 

Claude swallows away pretty promises and platitudes in favor of something else, “So what can I do for you instead, Teach?”

Byleth blinks in surprise. 

“Anything you ask. A vial of poison. My bow. My wyvern. A kiss?” he winks at her and she smiles. It is faint, but it is a real smile nonetheless. It is something so delicate he aches to kiss it, over and over, until she swelled with real happiness again.

She considers in silence, rolling the thought in her mind, and Claude waits on her as patiently as he had done as a student by her desk, waiting for her to finish papers. 

“A date,” she says softly and that – yeah, that he could definitely –

“What’s this about a date?” a younger Hilda folds her arms over the two of them. She looks Claude up and down, her shoulders squared and a little stand-offish as she inserts herself between them. She blinks at Byleth and frowns, “Professor, what was all that you were saying about avoiding the future versions of ourselves?”

Behind her a younger Claude winks at him and all at once Claude understood the desire to strangle himself.

Byleth chuckles, her smile hiding away as she rises. The younger Claude blinks at the change, his focus going razor sharp. Assessing. The look he gives Claude is accusatory and distrustful.

“No,” Byleth says, “Not for me. I only said he should take his wife on one … a flight to the wyvern nests. He promised her a pick of the next brood.”

She’s speaking of their first date. A date this Byleth had never had because he’d taken her the morning after the siege on Derdriu. He had hauled them both from bed, sore and well-marked from their reunion the night prior, and then complained about saddle sores until Byleth had had enough of his whining. She’d shoved him to the ground the moment they dismounted and coaxed out different moans until he was certain they’d scare off the nesting wyverns and there would be nothing for her to claim beside him that day.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice carefully controlled, “She’d like that. It’s about time she got her own. 'Someone big enough to leap from.' The last time she went flying, she nearly stopped my heart leaping off mine.”

Byleth flashes him a private grin and it is dizzying enough he stops talking.

_“Knew you would catch me,” she says, her eyes shining as he sweeps under her._

“I’m certain you caught her. And I’m sure you’ve done worst,” she says, familiar words from a familiar face, “She’ll have you make up for your list of sins during your academy days.”

Claude laughs, turning to his younger self as he brushes himself off as he rises, “Yeah, hear that? All your fault. Spare your Teach here the grievance or you’ll be paying for it the rest of your life.”

“Mmm, never know, maybe my harmless pranks are what got you your wife,” his younger self snipes back, a fight brewing on his face, his eyes on the ring against Claude’s chest. 

His interest feels like a needlepoint, sharp and narrow. Green eyes flick between Claude and Byleth and –

_Ah._

Claude … 

Claude remembers his Academy days. Brimming over with questions, suspicious of everyone and the Church, surrounded by enough mysteries to drown himself in. He recalls well the many directions he’d been pulled in, caught in ever-changing tides. But if his attention had been focused … if he’d had a set of secrets to set his teeth into and five years to plan …

“Maybe I’ll tell you exactly how I won her,” Claude says in Almyran and while Byleth can flash her eyes at him in suspicion all she likes, this Byleth had never learned. Had never had the words teased from her under his careful tutelage. 

His younger self’s face flickers. Annoyance and intrigue in equal parts. His eyes flick to Hilda first - self-preserving little shit. Then Byleth. He is too Almyran bred to not see the tension that’d come over her. Too curious to let it go; Claude can see the moment he has him. 

“Fine fine, I’ll cut down on the pranks. No need for name-calling - man, where’d older me even pick up on that kinda language,” Claude’s younger self says, spinning a lie and a tale without a thought. He smiles at Claude - he doesn’t remember ever looking quite so irritating - before taking Byleth’s hand, holding her fingertips loosely, “Anyways, Teach - we should run along. Did you know there’s a Goddess from Fodlan here?“

Byleth’s eyes widen. Attention caught.

Claude’s younger self flashes him a look then twitches his fingers, a there and gone little gesture indicating where they should next meet before tugging Byleth away. Claude watches them go, watching the sun dip low over Byleth’s shoulders like the weight of the world ready to swallow her whole.

_“I love you. With everything I am. And the next time we see each other... it will be at the dawn of a whole new world. A peaceful, happy world.”_

A world he’d make sure this Byleth saw as well. 

**Author's Note:**

> me crying: pls stop writing oneshots to focus on long!fic
> 
> also me: haha what if sad hours in Askr. what if more dragon smut. what if felileth drabbles. what if –


End file.
